Tabi’s Story & The White Working Class

Yesterday morning before leaving for church, I e-mailed Sam M. this detail-rich Washington Post story about Tabi Rouzzo, a white working-class girl from a Rust Belt town in western Pennsylvania. It hits on so many themes that we’ve been talking about recently on this blog. Here are some excerpts:

Tabi shared the rental house with her mother and sometimes her mother’s boyfriend. Her four older siblings were grown. None of them had graduated from high school. They wore headsets and hairnets to jobs that were so futureless that getting pregnant at 20 seemed an enriching diversion. Born too late to witness the blue-collar stability that had once been possible, they occupied the bottom of the U.S. economy.

“I’m running from everything they are,” she said.

The question was whether Tabi could outrun the odds against her.

More:

Tabi heard stories about the olden days. She came from welders and ceramic production workers. But, to Tabi, the sprawling Shenango China factory where her grandfather and great-grandfather worked was just a boarded-up place on the way to Wal-Mart.

Her New Castle was the one that existed now: white, working class, with poverty that had deepened into the second and third generations. Nearly three-fourths of the students in Tabi’s school qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, and one-third of New Castle families with children younger than 18 had incomes beneath the poverty level.

During the 2012 election, the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney visited Pennsylvania a combined 38 times. With Ohio next door, the candidates and their wives barnstormed the region like few other places, focused almost entirely on the economy and strengthening the middle class. After the election, New Castle was still a hard town to be young and poor in.

They had $50 prepaid phones and $5 Day-Glo earbuds with the Chinese innards spilling out. They went to Township Tan for the 15-minute prom special. But the backwash of America’s affluence was a dim substitute for the promise of the middle class, which had moved farther from their reach. The decline in economic mobility has made the bottom more difficult to climb up from.

Unlike her counterparts in higher ranges, prepped for ascension, Tabi Rouzzo had only herself.

At 13, she started working in a deer slaughterhouse. Her friend Gloria told her about it, and Gloria’s mom drove them out there. They were greeted by a cold room with kerosene heaters. For $10 an hour, Tabi was to stand at a table cutting butterfly filets.

With a bloody knife in her hand and a circular saw whining behind her, labor laws being violated by the minute, Tabi decided on the spot that work offered freedom. She went back the next two winters, through 10th grade. Off-season, she cleaned rental properties, clerked in a mini-mart and baled hay at a farm.

In 11th grade, Tabi needed a job she could walk to and found Splitstone Entertainment, a storefront that sold used electronics, along with a selection of stun guns, nunchucks, ninja throwing stars and factory-boxed Star Wars collectibles. People brought in their Xboxes and PlayStations to unload, and Tabi cleaned them for resale.

“The controllers are real greasy,” she said one Saturday afternoon, pulling back her hair for the task. She was not complaining. Even describing the slaughterhouse, she sounded like a butcher and not a squee girl. “I’m a grown man,” she joked. It was somehow true. She had not a line on her porcelain face but a weariness was already in her.

Another:

Inside the church, God’s abundance overflowed. Pastor Shawn had ordered enough pizzas and nachos to feed the Rust Belt. Shawn Galla, the 26-year-old youth pastor, had convinced church elders that a night of metal music and free prizes was more likely to bring in New Castle’s teenagers than praise music and juice boxes.

Having grown up in working-class Pittsburgh with a single mother, Pastor Shawn thought he knew his audience when he took the job in New Castle in 2008, until he launched a fundraising drive for his kids and found their parents selling the Auntie Anne’s pretzels for cash for themselves.

Tabi had inched her way to the front of the crowd when the lights went down and the screaming started. Pastor Shawn was on stage ready to start flinging CDs and McDonald’s gift cards into the crowd.

“We’re giving away free stuff!” he yelled. “EVEN JESUS!”

The band Icon For Hire was pierced and mohawked. “WHAT’S UP, NEW CASTLE!” the lead singer shouted, and the head banging commenced. The evening’s motivational speaker, Seth Franco, a former Harlem Globetrotter, told his story of injury and comeback and invited anyone to raise their hands and come forward if they wanted to accept Jesus Christ.

“There’s more to life than nothing,” Seth said, as the electric keyboard softly lulled and the lights dimmed. “There’s more to life than this town.”

Words to Tabi’s ears. She was not exceptionally pious and she had made her share of transgressions, but she always felt better at this moment when she closed her eyes and let go. The kids from the bus had their heads bowed, too. Some were wiping away tears, a few were sobbing, their shoulders heaving in the darkness of the church.

Then the lights blasted back on and Pastor Shawn was onstage, holding something small in his hand.

“WHO WANTS AN IPOD?”

Oy. One more, this bit about a fight between Tabi and her mother:

The explosion happened on a Saturday night. Patricia was bigger, badder and louder than Tabi. But Tabi had resentment that went back years.

She said Deric hadn’t brainwashed her against her family; the feelings were entirely her own. There was a difference between bad luck and bad choices, Tabi said, and she had grown up captive of her mother’s choices.

“Mom,” Tabi yelled back, “you quit school. Does it dawn on you after your first [child] not to have a second one?”

It was a lethal blow, as only a teenage girl could deliver. Patricia got pregnant in the eighth grade, the same age Tabi was when she started at the slaughterhouse.

By now, you know whether or not you want to read the whole thing. I hope you will. I hardly know where to start with commentary.

A couple of things come to mind, though. One, it’s really tragic to see how family, far from being the stable and nurturing basis from which one can launch oneself, can instead serve as the incubator of dysfunction and ruin. I have known several people — all women, come to think of it — who have been in situations exactly like Tabi’s. Anything they did to better themselves educationally or otherwise caused their family to turn on them, and accuse them bitterly of selling out, of getting above themselves. It’s hard for people like me — raised by two parents, a mom and a dad who nurtured their children, encouraged them to achieve, and who, while not perfect and certainly far from rich, provided a home that was materially secure and morally orderly — to understand what someone like Tabi has to overcome. Not many people have it easy, making a good life for themselves in this world, but good lord, for people whose families actively try to tear them down? It is bitterly tragic that, in order to give herself a chance at a better future for herself by breaking out of her mother’s destructive orbit, she has to cultivate spite for her mother.

(On that point, I’m not going to reveal how Tabi got out of town, but I will say that I know a black woman from my town who was also from a dysfunctional, impoverished family, and took the same route. She has done extremely well for herself since then … and she told me that she can never consider returning home as I have done, because there is nothing for her here but more of the same poisonous dysfunction that she escaped.)

A second point: reading Tabi’s story made me appreciate all the more how important religion is to the poor, not only as a consolation amid despair, but also as a means for giving one the internal means to resist and endure the corruption and collapse around one. Wealthy people, and middle-class people, usually have the resources — material and social — to absorb deleterious consequences from bad behavior. Not infinite resources, of course, but it’s harder to fall through the cracks when you have monetary capital and social capital. The poor live without those margins. The kinds of morals that aristocrats (so to speak) live with can be deadly to the poor. Educated people don’t want to talk about that, because it sounds like a justification of different moral standards for the poor, versus everybody else. It seems to me that that’s just plain good sense; when you can’t count on a strong structure to hold you up from the outside, you have to make your internal structure even stronger.

When I think about this kind of thing, I always go back to these passages from Robert D. Kaplan’s 1994 “Coming Anarchy” story from The Atlantic:

“In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa,” [an African government official] continued, “there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another.” Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have “a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made her invisible, so that she could cross to the army’s positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the rebels’ chances of success.”

Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in West Africa told me that they were from “extended” families, with a mother in one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family structures are largely responsible for the world’s highest birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities.

More:

But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns are not all bad.

Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler’s checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home—order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

The point is that poverty does not have to mean social and moral chaos and decay. Strong religion — and I don’t mean religion that is merely emotional — has a lot to do with building the kind of structure within individuals and communities that makes it easier to endure the trials of poverty without succumbing.

Anyway, look, there are lots of things we can talk about in Anne Hull’s rich portrait of a working-class Rust Belt woman who has everything stacked against her, but who is determined to overcome. I think too about how the black middle class, or those African-Americans who lived by bourgeois values, got out of the ghettoes as soon as the fall of segregation made that possible. They didn’t want to raise their kids around all that either.

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71 Responses to Tabi’s Story & The White Working Class

Nowadays, however, elite culture in this country (largely influenced by liberal feminist ideas) is inveterately hostile to people marrying outside their social class, and the average indoctrinated upper middle class young man working at a bank or hospital in Pittsburgh wouldn’t even consider marrying someone from Tabi’s background.

Please elaborate on this point? I’m not sure whether the observation is correct or not, but the reasoning behind it would be interesting to see. I think it is true as a number of people have observed that where lawyers used to marry secretaries and doctors marry nurses they’re more likely to marry someone in the same occupational category, but I’m not sure that’s so much a question of class as of women having those jobs in the workplace.

Maybe the question of background would come into play with the realization that a marriage connects two families as well as the two indivduals wed, but, again, is there so much class prejudice? Lack of compatibility and shared experience or even a desire not to take on baggage, but that’s not necessarily class.

I went into the article looking to be impressed. And what I saw was about 90-95% of Tabi’s success was ‘big’ government and the support of the smart and sane people she could find. Religion got her outside Pennsylvania- to Guatemala- and into a group of people who hoped for better.

The poor are not the same in the U.S./West and in the Third World. After several generations of the welfare system in the West the bulk of the sufficiently functional people- the relatively smart and sane- such as Tabi are extracted from the poor population. In the U.S. the huge getting out of poverty occurred for white people in the first 2-3 decades after the New Deal; since then it’s fallen off to a trickle. This is also seen in recent immigrant populations- the bulk get out in the first generation, those who don’t and their offspring stay in. And after this sorting out those who remain in the welfare system are on average much more dysfunctional and permanently so than their predecessors were on average.

It would be nice if Third World poor populations were actually different, but when significant numbers migrate to e.g. Western European countries, they also rapidly sort out into those who get out of poverty and those dysfunctionally mired in it long term. Probably in similar proportions as Western populations did. The religiosity that migrates with them seems to make no meaningful difference.

Tabi’s family fits a genetic explanation for this. Her parents are screwups, mom in the stupid/slow learner dimension and dad likely primarily mood disorder (judging from the hard drug use which killed him). Modeling both to be dominant Mendelian-ish traits (which isn’t proven, but evident if you know enough families and watch what inherits how), you get a likelihood that any given child they have has a 75% chance of inheriting either or both problems. The two had five children, so average expectable maladapted/screwup children would be 3.75 under that model. And 1.25 children on average would inherit neither problem and be “different”, i.e. much more functional and adaptive. In short, able to get out. The article says the children seem to split 4:1, where Tabi is obviously the “1″. (It would be interesting to read a second article about one of Tabi’s siblings, as contrast, but it’s likely people would choose not to read it or regard it as cruelty.) This is close to the normal of the poor of New Castle, Pennsylvania, and not likely to be the normal case in the poor districts of Ankara- yet.

Religion can’t change that 4:1 split. It probably can’t find the 4 siblings people to marry that are much more functional, either, or prevent their repeating of their parents’ dysgenics. Thus passing on and probably increasing the misery in numbers and generations. But religion can console the 4 and console the 1, hopefully in somewhat different ways. Which is something, but I don’t see this as giving religion the enduring social role and salvific standing Rod is trying to find for it.

I saw TNR article, and felt guilty, because I had my kids at almost 41 and barely 43. I had them naturally, so I didn’t have to worry that fertility treatments would mess up my kids. My husband is four years younger than I am, so I also didn’t have to worry (as much) about advanced paternal age. Our kids are healthy and very bright. We are blessed.

My parents were older when I was born (41 and 51). My grandparents were older when my parents were born (maternal grandmother 39 and paternal grandmother 43). Although I am 45, my paternal grandmother was born in 1872! I think the article fails to recognize that many parents in the past had their last children at these ages. What is different now I think, is that more parents are having their first children at these ages. Maybe that is changing the genotype significantly, but I am a bit dubious.

Also, parents who are healthy enough to procreate naturally at an “advanced” age are more likely to live longer. Women who have children naturally after age 40 are statistically significantly more likely to live to age 100. My father died at 92, and my mother is very healthy at 86. I grieved mightily when my father died when I was 41, but many of my classmates had lost parents at much younger ages. My parents always claimed I kept them young. Maybe I did.

Re: Upward mobility is only possible with very high economic growth: rags-to-riches has never been the norm

Rags to riches never will be anything but rare. The usual movement is just a bit up or down the ladder, not ascending the whole length of it.
Our main problem however is not so much that people cannot move up, but rather that great numbers of people are being pushed forcibly downward.
The US compares very well to other nations in income mobility when you just look at the upper half of the distribution. But when you look at the lower half we look like a not very successful Third World economy.

I don’t think it always necessary to cut ties with kin to make it out of poverty. Dysfunctional kin, maybe, but in other cases one child making it out can encourage siblings to do likewise.

The military is a time tested ticket to the Middle Class if you play your cards right. As a first generation college student a decade ago, I could see no clearer path to funding an education and launching a career and it all worked out for me. I hope it works out for Tabi, and that she can get tuition covered as a Reservist. In some cases you can, but Reserve duty does not offer food and shelter and full time pay like Active service does.

Perhaps I’m showing my working class roots but I don’t really see the problem in having an i Pod drawing at a religious youth event. I logged a fair number of nights in these kind of gatherings as a high schooler and I reckon it did us all good.

I completely agree with Gretchen. When my father graduated high school in 1965 he had the opportunity to work for Bethlehem Steel in Richmond, CA, or as a Teamster in the Pepsi Bottling Plant, he even worked as a casual longshoreman on the Oakland docks. Those kind of blue collar jobs with decent pay and benefits are just not available to most American high school graduates anymore. Any one of those jobs my father could have made a career of, raised a family on his paycheck and retired from. Those kind of jobs are far and few in between anymore.

On crops rotting in the field, I doubt that this happened to a significant degree, at least in the way sdb portrays it. The fact of the matter is, some crops always rot in the field, because it is not worth the effort to pick every single crop.

As Sam M suggests, the real problem is greedy people who want to pay nothing. It’s like the claims that there are too few Americans qualified to do STEM work so we need to import foreigners. There are plenty of qualified Americans, just none that are willing to work at highly skilled jobs for $10/hour.

J: I think the real problem is that we spend too much time trying to reconcile Christianity with Darwin, and not enough time trying to reconcile Christianity with Darwin’s cousin.

I have been reading your posted essays on birth-rates, social-economic change, and living conditions for working-class folks versus upper-class people in the USA for the last few weeks. What all the hand-wringing discussion from Ross Douthat and similar about the need for natal policies promoting higher birthrates in prospering “blue” states versus the need to control birth rates in dysfunctional families having kids early in declining “red” states, I cannot help but think of the history of a country where I have been living for quite a while. During its modern post-War II ‘heyday” it: 1. Banned abortion and had a forced natalization policy, 2. Had a planned economy based upon large industrialization and agricultural farms, and profitably sold many wares in a protected economic market 3. Promoted STEM training in universities at the price of discouraging the humanities and social science studies (since there was a belief there were no real social problems worth studying and the governing social philosophy was held to be sacrosanct), 3. Imprisoned homosexuals and other social “deviants,” thereby showing no tolerance for “decadence,” etc. Under this system, families like the Tabi’s lived fairly well, if they behaved and followed the strong social norms. (Un)fortunately for its supporters, changing world economies, more free information about the outside world and its social-economic options (leading to a knowledge society and away from an industrial one), combined with hare-brained political rule in response caused this social-conservative (in behavioral terms) “ideal” to go very sour in the mid-to-late 1980s, with it all collapsing in late 1989. Any guess where this scenario took place?

Re: I think it is true as a number of people have observed that where lawyers used to marry secretaries and doctors marry nurses they’re more likely to marry someone in the same occupational category, but I’m not sure that’s so much a question of class as of women having those jobs in the workplace.

I think this is a result of the dysfunctional sexual marketplace, of the way we think about marriage and relationships, and also, yes, because this is an area where the interests of the economic ruling class dovetail with the interests of the cultural liberals. In this, as in so many other things, liberal feminism is merely the handmaiden of capitalism.

If we encouraged people to date / marry across class lines, instead of idealizing marriages in which both people are from socioeconomic backgrounds, we would help break down class boundaries, in the same way that intermarriage in Latin America helped break down ethnic boundaries. In reality, of course, the current status quo is pleasing both to the upper classes and the liberal feminists: to the first, because they want to retain their privileged status as a class, and to the second, because they hate marriages and relationships that follow the ‘complementarian’ model, or generally where the man has higher economic or social status than the woman. If Tabi married a doctor, Amanda Marcotte would be furious.

[Note from Rod: Do you suppose as well that people today look for different things in marriage than people in past generations? I mean, that they expect more complementarity than they used to? It seems to me that when I look at my mom and dad's generation (they married in 1964), men and women didn't have the same sort of expectation that they would be "friends" with their spouse as most of us do today. It would be hard for me to imagine being married to a woman who didn't have a college education, not that my education makes me better in any moral way, but because I would expect to be able to share more intellectual interests with my spouse. Similarly, my sister, who was college-educated but not intellectual or intellectually-oriented, would have been bored out of her mind with a spouse who focused on the kinds of things college-educated people tend to think and care about. As a general matter, I don't think these kinds of things even occurred to most people in our parents' generation. Just a theory. -- RD]

You left out of your wonderfully silly summary, the fact that after the collapse, standards of living, social indicators, birth rate, life expectancy and general social morale plummeted. That it took 17 years for the economy to return to the level it had been in 1990. And that a plurality of people in your country still seem to think they were better off in the 1970s than they are today.

My impression on the marriage question is that an attractive woman with an agreeable personality who had a middle class job and demonstrated that she could keep her life together in a responsible manner would not find it impossible to marry someone middle class despite escaping from a situation like Tabbi’s. In other words, a man who reached the stage of proposing would not change his mind on the grounds of her upbringing and family. That might have been the case 40 years ago and among some circles today, but I’m thinking in terms of what one would generally consider middle class in the United States today.

This is probably the start of a separate thread, but I think Rod is correct about the change in marital expectations. My elderly parents were outliers in their day because they were such close friends as well as spouses. (That makes losing a spouse doubly hard, just a life focused on career faces rough times when the career ends.) So I see his point. The consequence is that you have to have a lot more in common than perhaps in the past, although that’s a matter of temperament and interests rather than social class. Even then, one need not share all interests, but just a commonality in outlook.

Perhaps the connection with class is that a cultural divergence leaves fewer points of connection for a couple than may have been the case during an earlier day. It’s an interesting point to consider, especially since we live in a much more egalitarian world than before 1950.

In any case, personally, I’d be delighted with a society that combined some degree of cultural/social conservatism with economic socialism, and that emphasized, in both economic and social realms, the need to subordinate individual freedom to social equality, solidarity, and the common good.

It’s more important than working class families like the Rouzzos thrive, than that nitwits like the heroines of ‘Girls’ and the rich Wall Street types are able to live their responsibility-free lives in comfort.

We can argue big government/small government until we’re blue in the face but so much of what has created the U.S. as we know it today has been due to the actions of government from repealing Glass-Stegall to subsidizing, big agriculture, to creating the suburbs and driving out heavy industry. Only a reversal of such polices is going to change these things which all agree have created rural and blue collar poverty pockets like New Castle across the country. Religion may well be a nice way for the poor to cope in mist of disfunction, but the poor will ultimately vote for those things from government which also allows them to function. They do so in the inner city slums, they’ll do so in the poverty pockets as well (which may explain why Pennsylvania and Ohio went for Obama and why in 2016 a Kentucky or West Virginia may very well vote for Hilary Clinton). The only way you’re going to change this is by building a working/middle class again with property and means to live comfortably and have dreams and have jobs that provide for families again. That means changing policies which have decimated that class to almost nothing outside the public or service sectors of the economy.

American religion, no matter what the church, does not stand apart from American society, or at least not without great difficulty. The temptation to be “with it” is just too great.

By the way, I hate commenting on someone I don’t know but the protagonist in our article reminds me of a line from a movie: “The problem with teenagers is that you don’t know nothing, but you think you know everything.” Her mother maybe no prize but she deserves a little more respect than she’s been shown. When you have to figure out life’s complexities outside the home and away from family (like having a roof over your head), then perhaps you can tell us how much better you are compared to them.

This article contained a huge amount of blather and very little hard information.

Why didn’t Tabi have a bank account? Most banks have free student checking accounts which do not require a minimum. She should have kept her cash away from her greedy mother.

No mention of Tabi going to the local Planned Parenthood clinic and getting fitted with an IUD, which would probably be a far better life choice than taking field trips to Chicago or mission trips to Guatemala.

Mention of the boyfriend going to community college, but none about Tabi. (There are three community colleges in the area around New Castle.) Is this because community college is considered declasse? They don’t even require that you take the SAT – notice that the focus on the SAT is coming (editorially) from the writer, and probably from the high school guidance counselor. It was a waste of time for Tabi to prep for the SAT. Most likely she could have driven to the community college, taken their own placement tests, and started classes. She probably also would have qualified for Pell grants.

In short, poor kids get no counseling for academic advancement, or worse, they get completely erroneous misinformation. What I would say to someone like Tabi is:

- save money for a car, not four-year college.
- apply for pell grants and use them at a community college
- get an IUD, for crying out loud, and do not under any circumstances get pregnant
- ditch your parasitic family members, because they will not help you
- ignore your high school guidance counselors; they’re idiots.

But nobody tells poor girls any of this, so they continue to make the same mistakes, which get perpetuated down the generations.

sdb – right on!
I’ve heard that younger Christians like me respond better to the “belong, believe, behave” order of getting people to come to church and share the faith, while our parents and grandparents still hold to the “behave, believe, belong” model.
I greatly prefer the former – even if it does involve iPods.

Concerning those nurses and secretaries marrying doctors and lawyers: in all likelihood they came from similar family backgrounds as the men they married. People have always tended to marry within their social class, especially the elite. Terms such as “mesalliance”, “gold-digger” and “fortune hunter” are not of recent coinage.

It is Romania. Today, as a member of the EU, problems in the economy and governance surely exist, but people are having more babies than they did right after the revolution (it had an economic boom going on from 2004-2008). As part of joining the EU, the state had to do away with official discrimination of gay people and abortions are now legal, but the society is still rather conservative socially. But, unlike some places, intellectuals are appreciated and listened to. So, it has a achieved a reasonable social compromise now. (Two-year paid maternity leaves for mothers helps the birthrate as well.)

@JonF: I agree that gold-diggers have always been with us. But it was more common for nurses to marry doctors, or legal secretaries to marry lawyers fifty years ago than now. One major difference is that more women become lawyers and doctors, and the male lawyers and doctors marry them instead.

Further, many of these jobs like “secretary” have been largely eliminated due to information technology and automation. Engineers for instance are expected to write and edit their own documentation; keep their own schedules and make their own travel arrangements. Thirty years ago big engineering firms had secretaries and word processing staff to do it for them.

Now “office administrators” increasingly are expected to have BAs and look/act as educated people. The plucky girl who goes to ‘secretarial school’ and gets a proposal from the boss (my grandmother, no kidding) is a thing of the distant past.

This is why people will go into debt for a BA for their children – because as bad as the prospects are for someone with a BA, they’re far, far worse for someone without one, especially for a girl who isn’t going to go get a hazmat license and drive a truck. For these girls, it IS a matter of dead-end work in the service sector.

Once they have a child or two out of wedlock, they’re trapped, completely – even though having a child or two will probably substantially improve their cash flow situation.

Re: – get an IUD, for crying out loud, and do not under any circumstances get pregnant

One of the happiest families I know is one in which the mother got pregnant at 17. They have four kids now, and own a small carpentry business.

A friend of mine says that the best mother she knows is one who got pregnant at 17 and now has five kids.

A good friend of mine has a best friend who got pregnant earlier this year, at 21, and is marrying the father and raising the baby together.

Having a child ‘too young’, whatever that means, is quite often a bad idea, but it doesn’t have to ruin your life, and in a decent, civilized society it wouldn’t. The idea that that is some sort of monumental tragedy, is at its root antihuman and anti-life.

@Hector: It’s wonderful that things worked out for your friends. Unfortunately, the statistics belie the happy anecdata. Nor does it sound like anyone Tabi meets (given the scenario laid out in the article) is going to be able to pull off supporting four children with a “small carpentry business.” (How does that economically work, exactly, given the overwhelming burden of paying your own full payroll taxes, as well as small-business taxes at the personal level, and the cost of medical insurance for a family that includes maternity coverage? Most of those policies are well in excess of $15K-$25K/year.)

From my experience with and knowledge of larger lower income families with “small businesses,” most of these families are actually living off Earned Income Tax Credits, food stamps, state “CHIP” Medicaid (for the children), and they pay no federal income taxes. Further, many of them are in cash businesses that operate to some degree “off the books.”

I’m not saying your friends are doing that. But that’s the economic reality for a lot of small-business families in similar situations. In short, they make it on federal and state subsidies. The difference is that these subsidies are delivered in ways that soothe the “stigma” of “being on welfare.”

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not taking the libertarian position here. Most non-rich families cannot make it without some kind of tax credit or subsidy (even if it’s only the child federal income tax deduction.) As I see it, though, honesty is the best policy here – and in either case, whether “we” (i.e. society, taxpayers) pay for Tabi’s hypothetical IUD and Pell Grants on one hand, or EITC, tax deductions, and food stamps to the “more morally acceptable married family” on the other, it still all comes down to transfer payments and subsidies. It’s just that the wrapping is different, is all.

You and I probably both agree that it “shouldn’t” ruin one’s life, but again, statistically it often does. Young marriage (especially because the woman is pregnant) often ends in divorce and subsequent greater poverty for the woman, than if she would have gotten pregnant in the first place.